And of course, it pained me to break my decade-long streak of annual recap blog posts, which I hope to still post very belatedly.
But the world kept spinning and somehow I am lucky enough to have become a mom to a precious life for one month now! I won’t be sharing too much about my baby on this blog (at least for now) but I hope to be able to catch you all up on my journey to get here. Pregnancy symptoms, several adventures, an out-of-state move, and then life with a newborn have made blogging difficult to prioritize, but there is a lot I have been wanting to share so I hope as I find my groove in this new chapter of my life that I get to do just that.
Happy 1 month to my bundle of joy ♥️ You have made me one of the luckiest people in the world and for that I will forever be so grateful, for this past month and the many months ahead of us.
It’s been an exciting time for Asian representation in Hollywood cinema. We’ve been seeing more actors of Asian descent portray more types of characters than past decades have chosen to depict, and we’re getting to recognize a much larger number of familiar Asian faces portraying them as well!
A few months ago, I was invited to an early press screening for Joy Ride, the upcoming directorial debut from Adele Lim, who has previously written for Crazy Rich Asians and Raya and the Last Dragon. The trailer first crossed my social media feed via this tweet from Phil Yu, aka Angry Asian Man:
Fuck yeah! JOY RIDE. I am absolutely here for the Asian American women-led raunchy comedy. pic.twitter.com/mWLfK5xuwc
I don’t usually seek out raunchy comedies, but modern entries in the genre have been getting really fun with this nugget of an emotional core that has been increasingly better-executed than past generations. To see one led by an all-Asian and all-woman cast is really exciting, and the trailer looked funny! Would we get something like Girls Trip for millennial Asians?
TL;DR Yes! Joy Ride is such a fun ride from start to finish. It is packed with laughs, save a beat at the end where we explore its emotional core to incredible success, and manages to avoid relying on Asian-American comedy tropes that have become tired.
This cast is stellar, and I was so excited about the cameo appearances from other Asian actors who I recognized from Marvel, a favorite HBO show, Crazy Rich Asians, and more. In a time when there is validity to the complaint that certain Asian actors become popular and get cast in “everything” or will often appear in movies and TV shows together, it’s really nice to see just how many Asian characters we have been getting recently in movies and TV and the increased diversity in just the casting of these characters. And don’t worry, with 2 Broadway musical actresses in main cast, we do indeed get a bonkers musical number.
Honestly, I went into this movie thinking it would be a pretty shallow roadtrip movie with some toilet humor and too many jokes about Asian diaspora that are overdone, in my opinion as someone who has been in the Asian culture space for a long time. But I was really pleasantly surprised that this movie managed to be so irreverently funny while still having a strong emotional core, touching on Asian-American identity in a way that felt fresher than I’ve seen in a while in addition to topics like internalized racism, cultural barriers, sex positivity, artistic expression, queer identity, family dynamics and expectations, and more. And it does so while still showing some truly unhinged moments that I could not believe my eyes at.
Also, if the think pieces and blog posts are any indication, many people only venture out to the movie theater for huge action movies and/or to avoid having a big franchise storyline spoiled during opening weekend. I had forgotten how much fun it is to watch a comedy with a full theater laughing together. I’ll admit you may get annoyed about not being able to hear some dialogue over particularly raucous laughter but it really enhances the experience when you’re able to let loose and laugh out loud at a comedy versus watching something alone and quietly. Plus, not only did my theater laugh out loud throughout much of the movie, but the emotional beat the end had many of us crying, with the sounds of sniffles and a “girl are you crying right now??” heard from all around me, a very unexpected surround sound experience to get from this movie.
Joy Ride is in theaters TODAY, July 7th. Spoilers below the jump if you’d like to read more thoughts~
I don’t know why exactly but I feel compelled to document my current skincare routine just so I can see what I was using, maybe because I suspect I’m using products just for the sake of using them but they’re not doing much for me.
My family has decent skin genes, so I am already lucky enough to have a fairly agreeable skin canvas to work with. My T-zone gets oily in the summers and my cheeks get very dry in the winters. My skin concerns are around texture, brightness, and moisture, with the goal of maintaining what’s good about it and preventing future damage.
Here’s a list of products I’m currently using, and what I may add/swap in the near future
This year, after 2 years of spending my birthday mostly alone and at home, I decided to celebrate with my friends doing my favorite thing in the whole world: karaoke. In the days, weeks, and months leading up to my birthday, I hesitated a lot, constantly expressing to my partner that I should and would cancel any reservations and forgo having a social birthday for at least one more year. He talked me down frequently, reminding me that we are fully vaccinated and fully boosted as well, that our friends know how cautious we have been and especially how cautious I have been and would not risk infecting me if there was any reason to believe they could.
So I went and I had an incredible time on Friday evening. A staff member at the karaoke establishment recognized me from my previous birthdays celebrated there and pulled me up on the (new-to-me since 2019) stage to celebrate and pour sparkling wine into stranger party-goers’ mouths and generally be merry. It was a fulfillment of a wish I never even dared to make.
On Sunday, already a little hoarse and tired from an evening of singing for my life after having not sung for years, I screamed and cried and cheered as Argentina won their first world cup in decades, cementing Leo Messi’s status as one of the greatest to ever play the beautiful game.
On Monday, I went about my day and cooked a big pot of soup for myself, my partner, and my brother who was staying with us until his new lease started a few weeks later. I recall feeling the effects of all the singing and screaming of the weekend on my throat, and having been so busy with the day that I was uncharacteristically dehydrated. My lips and hands were dry, and my head was starting to hurt, not quite bad enough to call a migraine but enough that I realized I hadn’t had very much water at all that day, a bit embarrassing to realize as the person at work who reminds everyone to drink water. The three of us cleaned up after dinner and sat down to play video games together when I started feeling chilly. “Are you two cold at all?” I asked. Neither of them felt cold, but I had pretty distinct chills.
A knot of anxiety formed in my gut and I excused myself to take my temperature and also a COVID test, just in case. My temperature was normal, so I wasn’t experiencing a fever, but I wanted to see the negative test just to be safe. I swabbed my nose, set a timer for 15 minutes, went to the bathroom, and came back 3 minutes later to make sure the test was working correctly, bracing myself mentally for maybe that faint wisp of a line that you can barely see.
Last year, I confessed that I felt less ambitious than any year before, and that feeling has only grown over the course of 2022. I looked back on my resolutions I set last year and found that my big, broad goals for this year have essentially not changed. So I’ll leave them the same, there is no point in twisting myself into a pretzel trying to… have different goals? I am disappointed to not have made as much progress on them as I was hoping but it’s not bad to want the same big areas of improvement as I did a year ago.
I do have new concrete goals (remember my concrete vs. abstract days, wow I aspired to so much) that I am looking forward to working on this year but the rest of my goals are going to look very familiar.
Sip of Starrshine 